Sacha Guitry

After the then Cahiers Du Cinema critic the young Francois Truffaut wrote his scathing putdown of most of the directors working at the time in France (A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema) in 1954 he then expanded his short list of those who were worth paying attention to, and specifically championed the aging and unfashionable Sacha Guitry.In this Tv hour made about a decade later, Truffaut's close co!league Claude De Givray continues the claim for Guitry by talking to a small group of the late filmmaker's collaborators and scholars.Guitry was often dismissed, like his fellow playwright auteur Marcel Pagnol, as simply having photographed canned theater, but the interviews here show, for instance that Sacha was technically adventurous in using an off screen narrator in 1936,likely the first time this had been done in a sound film, and in having devised elaborate camera movements one of which resembles a strategy later done by Godard.I hope viewers who see this documentary and have not yet encountered the cleverness and charm of the director will be motivated to do so, even if a certain part of the work's appeal requires an appreciation for the precision and beauty of the French language as Guitry used it.